


between the elevated road and the water

by homsantoft (tofsla)



Series: between the elevated road and the water [1]
Category: Dragon Age II
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Dissociation, Friendmance, Identity Building, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, M/M, Mutual Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-22
Updated: 2016-05-22
Packaged: 2018-06-09 23:41:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,535
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6929092
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tofsla/pseuds/homsantoft
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fenris remakes himself. A story about identity, waiting, and longing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	between the elevated road and the water

**Author's Note:**

  * For [serenityfails](https://archiveofourown.org/users/serenityfails/gifts).



> This was largely inspired by an amazing & painful comic that Katie drew, for which the dissociation & referenced sexual assault warnings also very much apply: **[Wait](http://serenity-fails.tumblr.com/post/139558154386/wait)** (now also available **[on AO3](http://archiveofourown.org/works/9224306)** ). In a way, this is something like a sequel.
> 
> Katie, James & Jared propped me up as I wrote this and yelled about elves with me.
> 
>  
> 
> [A playlist for pining, remembering & waiting (spotify)](https://open.spotify.com/user/homsan.toft/playlist/7aPMatPpFCD0ntijs2N5p7)
> 
>  
> 
> This story plays out between the act 2 & act 3 romance scenes.
> 
> The sexual assault tag refers to Fenris' past.
> 
> Sections of the Canticle of Shartan are taken from World of Thedas 2. Sections from A Slave's Life are entirely invented.

Here is the threshold between shadow and light. The night streets are quiet, cool now with the year turning towards its end. No deep winter here, but a definite shift of seasons. In Tevinter, in all the Nocen Sea cities, there are torrential rains and long droughts. Rain on the hard dusty ground, pooling, rushing, a street become a river. On Seheron, the air is thick and damp under the jungle canopy. Here it merely grows cooler, greyer. The rain falls a little more often, and turns on occasion to ice. People withdraw into their houses and light their candles and shutter the windows, the eyes of the buildings closed. Pleasant, lonely. In the distance, a dog barks. 

Fenris has never objected to shadow or to loneliness.

But he stands all the same at the door, and hesitates. Light spills from below it in a fine gold line. The smell of stale ale. Voices, an indistinct murmur.

Why does he stand there?

No, this he knows. Better to ask: why does he hesitate?

He hesitates for the same reason he stands here, and that is because he has transgressed.

Hawke's breath came in rasping gasps almost from the first, his hands restless, unsure where to settle, uncertain what touch could be permitted. Fenris grasped them, kissed them, back and then palm; pushed them up above Hawke's head. Watched every shift of Hawke's face, catalogued them all, as though a part of him knew from that first moment of skin against skin that it would be too much.

How selfish one could be. Can be. 

Hawke's dark eyes. Curling dark hair spreading on the pillow. The flex of his stomach under Fenris' hands. Warm skin, the tone of it too dark for the image of Ferelden that the people here carry in their minds. The ambiguous markers of mixed heritage. 

He is beautiful.

Beloved. Fenris touched every part of him and sought refuge in him and could offer no haven in return.

Selfish, selfish.

He will not be selfish again.

And so he stands on the threshold.

And so he opens the door.

Tankard to a tabletop, dull and loud. Someone shouts, but not at him; still, always, a part of him expects that it will be at him. 

An aristocratic voice, entitled. You there, you, what is it he calls you. Little wolf—

A mercenary's voice. There he is, that's the one—good coin—

Worn floorboards beneath the feet, the uneven leg of a chair thudding against them as its occupant shifts. Everything in Kirkwall seems worn: streets and furniture and faces. Isabela has the rough skin of a sailor, but her eyes are bright. Merrill always looks tired, washed out to an indistinct shadow of herself no matter how animated her movements, her voice. This is what one gets for blood magic if one uses one's own blood, he supposes—he has rarely seen its like before. The two of them sit with their heads bowed together; Isabela shrieks laughter at something he is too far away to have heard.

And there is Hawke. Always, always, there is Hawke. Legs stretched out under the table, arm thrown around Varric's shoulder. They are conspirators, these two, although they don't lean together as Isabela and Merrill do. They appear careless, rather. Kings of the city. Hawke is dark and Varric is light, and it is Varric who walks in the shadows and Hawke who strides through the dusty streets as though he owns them. Was Malcolm Hawke so bold? Who was he, this man who Hawke must take after?

But here: imagine, to be pulled close against Hawke's side, arm around one's neck, hand light on one's chest. The warmth of him, the solidity. He has buried his face against Hawke's neck, knows the smell of him. Imagine, to let it surround him.

It is only a flash of an image, a clean incision with a sharp knife. It is when he recoils from the bladed edge of it, from the impossibility of it, that the blood begins to well. That it begins to sting.

Can one learn one's limits only by exceeding them?

How would he know?

He has half a mind to turn on his heel, unable to hold his sense of self together between the noises and smells, the flickering lights. He is pulled in too many directions at once. He becomes diffuse.

You're still a ghost, Varric said.

Yes. Perhaps. 

Only among people.

But Hawke looks up, sees him, face brightening and falling and brightening again, the play of emotions rapid. Dizzying. And as easily as that, he coalesces: he is Fenris, standing motionless two paces into the main room of the Hanged Man, and he is a fool.

Hawke smiles.

Well, better a fool than nothing at all.

He crosses the room.

"Elf!" Varric says, gestures to the empty chair at their table. "Try the wine. Tastes like nug piss."

"Know a lot about nug piss, do you?" Hawke asks.

"Expert," Varric says.

"I was not aware that tonight's entertainment would be a double act," Fenris says, and swipes the wine bottle before Varric can decide to withhold it.

It is indeed unfortunately sharp, the aftertaste unpleasant. Lingering and bitter.

He drinks. Large mouthfuls. Benefit to cost, balanced.

Hawke is watching him, the weight of it a physical pressure, and so he studies the bottle, the table, Varric's hands; everything but the thing he most wants to see.

"Wicked grace," Varric says, sudden and loud. "Hey, Rivaini, stop flirting and get your ass over here."

"Spoilsport," Isabela says. 

Merrill giggles.

Misfits and mages. Hawke's staff leans against the wall in the narrow space between his chair and Varric's, narrow itself, bladed like a pikestaff. A peculiar piece of deception. There is an anxiety to the sight of it, but it is anxiety of a complex sort. Is it really safe—

For him? For Hawke?

He cannot help looking to Hawke as he thinks it, his muscular arms bare despite the season, his hands huge and rough. His stomach is soft beneath his shirt, Fenris knows. On his chest, his hair is thick and coarse. A great bear of a man with a great bear of a dog, is it, Varric said once, and laughed; Carver had flushed at it, rounded angrily on Hawke, who held up his hands defensively, laughing himself.

You told him that? Can't you just let it go—

Come on, brother, it was such a good one—

Bear, barking happily, slobbering on Carver's hands.

Carver walks another path now, deep below the surface of the world. Leandra is dead. Hawke is Hawke; there may as well be no other. He is alone. 

He is not made to be alone.

"You deal," Varric says, thrusting the cards towards Fenris, who, taken by surprise, is a fraction too slow to look away from Hawke; flushes at being caught out, and bows himself hastily to the business of cutting the deck, the cards waxy and smooth against his fingertips, the edges worn, no hardness to them as he shuffles them together. Focus on the sound of it, the wingbeat thrumming of their steady intercutting fall.

Conversation flows around him. 

Hawke laughs.

Before he looked away, he saw Hawke's lips drawing out into a smile; saw his eyes set in dark circles, hooded and sad.

Fenris is not egotistical enough to think that he did this; but he did nothing, after all, to alleviate it. And so he sits here. See, I'm not avoiding you. See, we can go on.

Deal.

The clink of coins. Merrill, chin on hand, only watches; peers over Isabela's arm at her cards. Isabela tilts them for her to see.

"Oh, come on," Hawke says. "Where's the fun if you let us see all Merrill's tells as well as yours?"

"Spoken like a man with more money than he knows what to do with," Fenris says. Glances up at him, smiles, wishes it were more definite—but it is at least genuine.

Hawke's eyes soften. Fleeting.

"Don't you worry about that, Elf," Varric says. "We'll see to relieving him of some of it."

Fenris, who has lived by being sensitive to the mood of a room, feels that there is something studied about his casualness. Well—perhaps he and Hawke have talked. Of course he and Hawke have talked. They talk constantly, about everything. How could he have expected—

Hawke's foot nudges his under the table; his face is a question.

Fenris shakes his head, no, I'm fine, I'm fine.

He doesn't know if he is fine. He isn't certain he even knows what that state of being is. It is not: I have never been fine. It is only that same question, the one he must ask himself again and again: 

How would I know?

A moment: night-flowering jasmine forms a fragrant screen, and the person who became Fenris crouches behind it, back to the wall. From a window above, laughter spills, and riotous music.

A person beside him passes him a cup of watered down wine, forbidden, and he laughs as he drinks from it. 

Who is the person? He could not say. Does not remember their face. Only music and light and the smell of jasmine, the dregs of some expensive wine sweet on the tongue.

He thinks perhaps he cared for them, whoever they were. He thinks, also, that there may be no virtue to reclaiming these minute, fragmented pieces of memory. They will not return him to who he was. Perhaps who he was is not someone he would even wish to become again.

But he has a sister—

He has lost the flow of the game, startles as Hawke nudges him again, "Your turn, Fenris. Stop staring at the wine like it insulted your dog."

"How Fereldan of you," Fenris says. Adds, without thinking: "Perhaps it did."

Flushes. Hawke's face goes still.

"Ooh," Merrill says, "you have a dog?"

Isabela snorts.

" _Oh_ ," Merrill says. Considers. "I thought he was meant to be a bear."

"She's right, you know," Hawke says. "The only dog around here is Bear."

And this is where Carver should say: Sweet Maker, I hate you sometimes.

It has been years. There is a moment of silence where the words should go all the same.

"Well, you know what they say about dogs and their owners," Varric says.

"Excuse me," Hawke says, "I'm far more hairy than Bear. Come _on_ , Fenris, I'm going to sober up before you remember your cards."

His hand is poor, but it doesn't matter. It is not for the game that he came here.

 

 

"Sorry about them," Hawke says. "They get too much sometimes—"

Cool empty streets again, the late night edging towards early morning. Fenris was the first to leave, and here Hawke is anyway, not enjoying more drinks with his friends or falling asleep fully clothed on Varric's bed.

Fenris shrugs. "I am used to your company. They're hardly worse."

Hawke, uncharacteristically, leaves the bait where it lies.

"You look kind of—"

Bad. Worn and upset with himself. Lost.

Certainly.

"Tired," Hawke says.

"Yes," Fenris agrees. 

"But you're alright?"

Fenris shrugs.

"Get some rest," Hawke says. "Come and see me whenever you like. I found something you might want, actually."

Fenris has a very good idea of what he wants, but it isn't on the table.

He left a bruise on Hawke's neck, knows exactly where it lies, half-hidden in the shadows where they stand just outside the door of the tavern.

The breeze is damp from the sea, chilly. It begins, already, to seep through his clothes.

"I'll—do that," he says.

"You don't have to," Hawke says. "Listen, Fenris—you never have to do anything you don't like."

"I know," Fenris says. "I would like to visit you." It is only a shadow of the true shape of his terrifying, unmanageable desire. And still, he will take it.

"Good," Hawke says. "Alright, that's good."

"Go back to your friends," Fenris says. "You know where to find me. Goodnight, Hawke."

"Goodnight," Hawke says. "Try not to get lost on your way home, I think Varric's all out of bits of string." Goes to touch Fenris on the back of the shoulder, a well-worn routine upon their parting. Hesitates.

They are frozen, caught in a half-gesture that neither of them are sure how to complete.

Hawke withdraws his hand, and that hurts, aches under his ribs; but he is not sure the alternative would have hurt less.

He nods regardless, and turns to leave, and is certain that Hawke watches him all the way to the corner of the street, even though he doesn't once look back to check.

 

 

Alone, he turns over a chair in frustration, stares at it where it lies, the seat cushion flung away to the far side of the room, one more dent in the varnish. A leg newly misaligned.

Why should he care? Nothing in this wreck of a house is his.

There are more chairs.

He sits on the floor, and bends his head to his knees.

Lie with a mage. Oh, yes, a mage who has shown nothing but kindness; a mage who makes you smile, laugh. A mage who holds his magic tightly leashed, checks himself as well as any templar even as he asserts his right to exist in every unbowed line of his body. Holds nothing sacred, it seems, but is watchful beneath it.

Fenris would, he thinks, have adored Hawke. Even without—without this. Would have adored his kindness, his casual humour that means a sort of acceptance. He has never thought Fenris fragile. How Fenris loathes to be thought fragile.

But still, he has respected Fenris' past.

And on the other side of things:

Still, he is a mage.

His magic resonated through Fenris, that night. It was nothing he intended, nothing he could have prevented. It made little enough difference, probably, in the end; the flaw was in Fenris himself. But it was one more reminder.

He fucked Hawke. Leant over him, holding his legs spread, and Hawke gasped in amazement at his strength, clung to the headboard where Fenris had placed his hands.

Fenris' head bowed to Hawke's chest. Shallow thrusts, Hawke hot around him. 

His body sang, but it was only a body. He watched it act as if from outside himself, and yet he feels that he may, perhaps, be only a body, in the end. What is this thing that calls itself Fenris? This thing that separates, becomes unreal?

It is a hollow shell in search of content. It is filled, in moments, with rage. It is filled, in moments, with desire. It acts and, acting, destroys. 

It knows nothing else.

 

 

He sleeps poorly, and, waking, feels shame at the the storm of his feelings from the night before. Oh yes, he exists; oh, yes, he lives. He must believe—he must try to believe—that it was strength, and not weakness, that sent him running from Hawke. 

No easy thing, not when some deep part of him, some core where a person called Fenris is trying to shape himself, longs to run right back to him. To beg forgiveness.

He has seen how Hawke's gaze lingers on the scrap of red that Fenris has tied around his wrist. Has seen the desperate confusion in Hawke's gaze.

Imagine: Hawke smiling, saying something terrible. The only thing to forgive is you making off with my stuff like you're trying to be Isabela. He would cup Fenris' face between his hands and kiss him so softly, and Fenris would take and take and take, and try to learn how to be—

He cannot do it. Will not.

Cold water chases away the last of the haze of sleep. Clothes are armour against the world. Downstairs there's food from the guard barracks; Aveline leaves it regularly, although she loses patience with him every time. Why won't you just act like a person. As though he were a petulant child.

Downstairs there is also Isabela, sitting on the only sturdy table, legs swinging. The dusty sunlight falls across her from the high window, illuminates her skin.

"Oh," she says, "you're alive, then."

"No need to sound so pleased," Fenris says.

Isabela laughs. Fenris, stumbling through his morning routine, counts the heartbeats until she launches into whatever it is she's come to say.

Three, four, five.

"So," she says. "You and Hawke—"

"I'm not going to talk about it," Fenris says.

"Oh, come _on_ ," Isabela says. "Does nobody around here kiss and tell?"

"There is nothing to tell," Fenris says. "There is nothing between us."

Isabela raises an eyebrow, looks pointedly at his wrist.

Water spills from the cup in his hand, cool against his fingers, pooling in drops on the tabletop.

He stares at it.

"Fine," Isabela says. "There's nothing to tell."

She puts a hand against his, steadying.

"I'll stab him if you like," she adds. "Just a little bit. You know, if he needs it."

"Please don't," he says. "He is not at fault."

She laughs again. "You never let me have any fun."

"You don't want to stab Hawke," Fenris says. "You would have to find someone else to laugh at your jokes."

"I suppose," she says, and stands. "Look, Fenris—"

"Don't," he says, over her. "Don't start being careful. I cannot bear it. Be inappropriate, rather. I find it—"

He breaks off, unable to articulate what he would like to say. It is not that the jokes are amusing. It is not that he would wish for everyone to treat him as she does. But he thinks he understands her meaning. This is how she manages her life, and so she attempts to extend the same courtesy to him. In a backwards sort of way, it is effective. Even when it irritates.

It is the same as Hawke's humour, in a way. An act of faith.

"I know," Isabela says. Softness, only for one moment. She does know; of course she knows.

This he envies her, at least: her past is dead. 

One day, he hopes, he will be able to say as much himself. One day, he will rip Danarius' heart from his chest, and he will be free.

"Come on," Isabela says. "Let's go heckle a shopkeeper or something. You need the air, and I need a straightman."

"What a flattering offer," Fenris says. "Yes. Yes, I think I could do that."

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Hawke's home is two streets away from Fenris', and also in another reality: a reality where the sun falls clear and bright through polished windows, where lamps burn with a comfortable steady light in a quiet library. Where people come and go, talk and laugh; where, even alone, there is a sense of life continuing around them.

Fenris is glad for it. Hawke has people around him, even as he has lost his family.

But he feels strange here. Stands uncertainly in the hall: there, he pinned Hawke to the wall, heat flaring brilliantly through him. There, Hawke kissed him. No uncertainty in that moment. He had thought, for a time, looking up into Hawke's plain, gorgeous face, that he could have this. Something of his own, untainted.

"Fenris," Hawke says, standing in the doorway. "I wasn't sure you'd come." Such terrible sincerity that Fenris hardly knows how to bear it. 

"You should've let me know," he adds. "I would've cleaned the mabari drool off the armchair."

There he is.

He is trying. They are trying.

Let it be enough.

Orana bows neatly to him as they make their way to the library, as though to a superior. He cannot be comfortable with the gesture. But in this, too, all of them are trying.

She buys small sweets at the lowtown market on her days off; chooses them herself. She plays beautiful songs on the lute which make Fenris homesick for a place he loathes. He never had a fragment of her skill; was not encouraged to refine it. He was not to play discretely in some quiet corner. He was to stand in full view, silent, always silent, whatever was said around him. He was to bow: deeply to Danarius, and shallowly to all others. Pour wine. A favoured fighting dog to be shown off, well-trained, deadly.

He hopes that the songs mean something good to her.

The library door clicks gently closed.

Hawke leans back against the desk, one hand braced on the edge of it; his other wanders across the mess scattered on its surface, papers and books, a rather chewed stylus. Hawke or Bear?

Hawke picks up something apparently at random, a bundle of papers hastily folded into a booklet, turns it over in his hand.

"Oh, Anders, not _again,_ " he says. His fingers begin to move, but are stilled; he glances over at Fenris, a little sheepish. "Uh, do you mind if I—"

"If that's what I think it is, I cannot imagine anything more fitting," Fenris says, and feels a peculiar little thrill as the paper goes up in a controlled burst of flame, flash-fire, there and gone.

Hawke shakes ash from his hand.

"I know we don't have the same reasons for being cautious," Hawke says, "but didn't that feel good?"

Fenris is startled into laughter.

How nearly normal it is.

Does Hawke still feel the ghost of pleasure in all the places Fenris touched him? He hopes that he does, and that he doesn't. The desires are simultaneous and impossible to disentangle. He wants to say: I was here. 

He wants Hawke's happiness.

How good Hawke has been to him. Not a word, not a touch, that seems to demand Fenris back in his bed. A quiet hurt, on occasion. Held in check as his magic is held in check.

It has never mattered what Fenris wants before. Not in anything. Not in _this_ , never in this.

It is enough to make him regret, to imagine, although he knows—

Hawke starts into motion, starts Fenris mercifully out of his thoughts. A hand raised in recollection. "I've got something for you," He says. Shuffles hastily through the mess of his papers. Stretches out his offering with every appearance of blithe unconcern, but for the nervous flicker of his eyes off to the right. It is one of his tells when they play cards. It is a tell here too.

"A book," Fenris says, nonplussed. 

"It's about Shartan," Hawke says.

He traces the angles and curves of unknown symbols, the shape of them impressed into the leather of the cover, deep lines clear under his fingers.

These lines carry meaning, but it is obscured for him. It is a book about freedom, and he cannot read it.

How they waver back and forth, the two of them, between understanding and alienation. How he wants—how he wants. So very many things.

And then there is the book.

It is the life of Shartan he holds in his hands. The personhood of someone who was not meant to have any.

He wants, needs, to know. How was it that Shartan became a person? He knows how the story ended, but not the shape of it.

Even in death, Shartan was a person. A force. 

I was here.

But he cannot read.

"It's not too late to learn, you know," Hawke says, and for a moment Fenris is filled with anger and uncertainty which is only another form of shame; stamps down on it fast. If Hawke controls himself, can he do less?

"It's not pity, Fenris," Hawke says. "Personally I'd call it friendship, but what do I know."

For the second time in the conversation, Fenris smiles, laughter silent. But Hawke feels it. The moment of tension disarmed. He holds Hawke's words in his mind. Turns them over.

It is not too late.

"Would you teach me?" he asks.

"That's the idea," Hawke says. "Fair warning, Carver always thought I was the worst teacher in the world."

"I am not Carver," Fenris says. Gently.

"I know," Hawke says, and there is one of those moments of wistful longing—for Carver, or for Fenris, or both?

Yes: they waver.

"I'll see what I can get hold of to help," Hawke says. "I'm sure one of those Chantry sisters gives classes to urchins with horrific religious texts for the newly literate. Should be good for a laugh."

"I don't think you're taking this entirely seriously, Hawke," Fenris says, but he can feel the smile tugging at his lips.

"Oh," Hawke says, "I am, though. I take you seriously."

And perhaps it is true.

 

 

If Fenris loved him less, perhaps he would find learning in Hawke's company infuriating. Perhaps it is the singular focus that Fenris feels when he considers Hawke, the way he is unable to stop sifting through his words for clues, keys to some door whose location is unknown to him—perhaps it is only these things that make it work.

But it works. It works, in stops and starts. Days, together, with Hawke trying to keep a straight face over children's rhymes as Fenris pretends to be reproachful. Leaning close together over longer texts. That does _not_ make sense, Hawke—if I find this is another joke—

Hawke's laughter, his painfully neat writing that Fenris does his best to copy, to build for his muscles a routine in the way he would learn a fighting stance. Over, and over, and over.

Late nights, alone. 

Week upon week of it, month upon month. Frustration and triumph.

It is winter when Fenris lights the lanterns and bends himself over his gifted book, determined. Finger drawn slowly across the page to guide his eye. Laborious work, this. He does not mind it.

Words, won over the span of half a cheap candle's life.

And so it was that I, on the fifteenth day of Umbralis, left behind me that house in which I had been born, and although I was seven and twenty years I left it as a child: yet unformed, without direction or—

Here Fenris falters, considers, flips back and forth through the book of words and sounds that he and Hawke have annotated together, long afternoons in the study. Sunlight falling across the pages, across Hawke's great coarse hands. 

This part resists. 

A scrap of the paper on which he writes his notes, folded to mark his place. He turns the pages. Another:

Of all things we made weapons. The tools of the field we beat into swords and with the ruins of fine glass vessels we tipped our spears. As I had remade myself from—

As I had remade myself—

Hand splayed across the page, Fenris stares at the words.

 

 

We are made and remade a thousand times. We are made as tools: you, to clean. You, to plough and sow. You, to kill. Singular. Specialised.

We make ourselves as complex; we make ourselves as multiple, contradictory creatures.

I am a multitude of things. I am a person and, a person, have chosen to be a weapon. I am Andraste's hand, but I am not her servant. 

I am my own.

Shartan touches Fenris' shoulder across the space of a thousand years, and he says: you are.

We are scattered in space and time but we reach out to each other and tell each other of our existence.

No wonder Danarius never permitted Fenris to learn to read.

No wonder the Chantry struck Shartan from the Chant, even here in the South.

It is spring. The year turns, and Fenris writes slowly in a hand which begins to grow neat; there is peace in it, against the mounting tension in the city. It will be war, if he knows the Qunari. Sooner or later, it will be war.

Sooner, he imagines.

So he writes. Letters to nobody. Letters to Hawke, burnt. There is peace in this too, to give form to the thoughts he cannot bring himself to voice. Letters that are about desire. Letters that are about freedom. Short, halting. But they are letters.

Shartan wrote: I remade myself.

In the late evening quiet, he thinks of these things; he walks through the Chantry and feels that he is under hostile scrutiny. Gazes up at the statue of Andraste and wonders what she thinks of this world she has made.

Wonders what she thought, back then, of Shartan. Of a person who salvaged himself from the personal annihilation of slavery and chose to fight at her side. 

It is almost too much to bear.

Andraste smiles down upon him, even as the sisters follow him with suspicious eyes, his black armour, his sword.

Here is the end of the story: Shartan rushes to save Andraste from her pyre, and he bleeds, and she burns.

It only goes to show, Danarius said, that a slave can never truly become free—ludicrous, isn't it? Sometimes they try to rise up, but what is the best they can hope for? Shartan dies, and for what—because he can't understand life without the woman he's decided is his new master.

His companions laughed, raucous.

What did he think, then? He hardly had context for the words. He moved through an unreal repetitive world, the same moments, over and over. Kill. Bow. Kneel. Serve. Say nothing, although your rest is stolen from you. Do nothing, although you are struck, although you are violated in a thousand ways.

It was as it was.

Perhaps, when Hadriana ripped his blankets from him and spat on him, he believed them.

Perhaps, when he bloodied his hands tearing apart the Fog Warriors who had been his friends, he believed them.

He doubted, later. He doubted when escaped slaves in Rivain laughed and sang and shared their bread with him although he barely came into the circle of their firelight, held himself silent. He learned of dissonant verses from a man who called himself a scholar, drunk in a tavern in Cumberland, but did not find them; sat as an unwelcome guest in another Chantry and imagined what might be sung, were they permitted. Doubted, more, again.

He has never felt that the Maker was meant for him, although Chantries have been a place of shelter, on occasion. He does not wish to pray. But he wishes, he wishes—

He squares his shoulders. A bent stance for fighting with the sword, but a straight one for fighting with words. Up the stairs, before boldness deserts him.

"Tell me," he says, to Grand Cleric Elthina, who listens, because she has seen him with Hawke or simply because she is the sort of person who listens to the outcasts. "Tell me if there is anything I may learn of Shartan here."

 

 

Shartan 9:27

_And Shartan looked upon the Prophet Andraste_  
_And said: "The People will set ourselves free._  
_Your host from the South may march_  
_Alongside us."_

 

 

Aveline, her eyes darting uneasily around the room as they always do when faced with the state of Fenris' home. Her fingers dragging through the dust on the mantle.

"You're writing now," she says. "That's good, Fenris."

"What does Varric call this," Fenris says. "A career review?"

"I call it reasonable concern," Aveline says.

"I don't," Fenris says, but relents at her look, raises a hand in defeat. "Yes, I'm writing now."

He feels even more uncomfortably scrutinised as she touches a hand to the lines of his writing, insignificant things only, but his all the same. Aveline smiles at the paper. Why does she smile?

"You wanted help," Aveline says, looking up from the text.

"Yes," Fenris says. "I—did Hawke tell you that I have a sister?"

"No, he didn't," Aveline says. "I know he seems like a tactless fool at times, but he isn't in the habit of sharing your business with me, Fenris. He cares for you."

"I know," Fenris says, and for a moment he is wretched, bowed. He straightens. "Her name is Varania. I wish—I would contact her, but I doubt it is safe for me to do so. I wonder if you might advise me."

"Why me?" Aveline asks. "Hawke would know as much as I do. Varric might know more."

"I am too far indebted to Hawke already," Fenris says. "It is far beyond what I can hope to repay. And Varric is Hawke's. His loyalty is—admirable. His discretion, less so. But you I trust. And I might work for you, as you need it. Call it an exchange of services. A debt I need not feel bowed by the weight of."

"You and Hawke," Aveline begins, sighs at the look on Fenris' face. Says, instead, "You can tell me whatever you need to, you know," like a tired teacher who knows her student will do nothing of the sort.

Where does that image come from?

"Yes," Aveline says. "I'll help you."

 

 

In the Hanged Man, the world might not be turning. It is as it has always been, filthy and rat-infested and familiar. The same complaints, the same crude jokes. 

Hawke laughs again in Fenris' presence, not fleetingly, not with that melancholy chasing it from him. Openly, as he should.

He still looks, glances, tries to see what he can find of Fenris in unguarded moments. Fenris still wants, always, to reach for him.

Varric still studies the two of them closely. Breaks in when Fenris gazes for too long at Hawke's hands, "Alright, Elf, let's have a joke. I still don't believe the last one was on purpose."

It is possible, in fact, that Fenris will never stop wanting to reach for Hawke. He aches with the need for it, the desire to wrap himself up in Hawke and pretend. But he cannot take it.

He looks, only, as Hawke looks only. He pretends he does not hear the end of hastily broken off conversation between Hawke and Varric when he goes up to Varric's room late at night in search of peace, the clamour of the bar grown too much.

I didn't mean to hurt him, but I did. 

What if he never—I just want him to be alright.

Shit, Hawke, you're turning serious in your old age.

A muffled sound of protest, rather damp.

Could it be that Hawke is—

"Elf," Varric says. "Didn't know you were still here. Fed up with Rivaini joking about chains?"

"Fed up with recitations of atrocious poetry," Fenris says. "If you have company, I won't trouble you."

"Just me," Hawke calls from around the corner, and now he sounds normal. "I don't count. Come on in, take refuge from the romantic plucked birds with us. We found the best brandy in the place, which mostly means it's not rat-flavoured _or_ nug flavoured. Kills your sense of taste after the first mouthfull too. Perfect, really."

"How am I to refuse such a magnificent prize," Fenris says, although he knows that he should go, leave Hawke to his unmasked melancholy rather that pushing him back into frivolity. But there are limits to his strength.

 

 

So this is the shape of it. Words and silence. Fenris sits with the pieces of a puzzle and feels that he is on the edge of some understanding, could he only fit them together. Hunts, waits. Longs.

And of course, then it is war.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

It is all of it changed.

"I think I need to leave the city for a bit," Isabela says. She's muted now, tired. Dark rings around the eyes, covered with smudged kohl. Burnt timber stacked in heaps on street corners. The bodies of the dead are still being counted. "I've had about as much moral fibre as I can take."

"Will running help?" Fenris asks.

"It usually does," Isabela says.

"I would miss you," Fenris says. "You are—a friend. I have few."

"Some friend," Isabela says, sighs. "I'll write, alright? I already promised Merrill I'd write. And I'll come back."

"Will you," Fenris says.

"I just need some air," she says. "This bloody city reeks right now. Not in the good way."

"There's a good way?" Fenris asks. A thin attempt at humour. But she smiles.

"Oh, you know. Sex. Life. Piss is alright, if you like that sort of thing."

But now the city only smells of pyres.

"You were foolish," Fenris says. "But Hawke will forgive you."

"Are you talking about you or me now?" Isabela asks, sharp; subsides quickly. "Sorry. That was low."

"A little," Fenris says, "but not unfair."

"I'll write," she says again, and kisses him on the cheek, and walks out with a swing in her step entirely at odds with the look she had on her face as she turned.

We are all masked, all strangers in the dark who fumble for understanding. In this city of chains, the stones soaked with the blood of slaves, we look for freedom and can barely find ourselves.

What Fenris finds instead is an acceptable bottle of wine, and so he goes, as he always does, to look for Hawke. Seeks him like the needles the Qunari use to navigate at sea seek North.

It is all of it changed, and yet he is the same.

 

 

He does not look far. Two streets, another reality. "Quick," Hawke says, a hissed whisper, "upstairs, before Bodahn comes back from the pantry."

"Is Bodahn your keeper now?" Fenris asks, amused; thrills at the way Hawke casually takes him by the wrist, drags him through the hall and up the stairs, even as he laughs. 

Orana covers her mouth as they pass, and Hawke grins, finger to his lips.

"Yes," Hawke says, clicks the bedroom door shut behind them, leans against it as though he expects Bodahn to come with a battering ram at any moment. Bear mutters on the bed, snorts and stretches. "If you ask him. I'm mortally wounded. Maybe you missed the memo. Oh, come on, you great useless lump, again? Really?"

"That's not a very nice thing to call me," Fenris says, as Bear gives a whining yawn and flops gracelessly off the bed.

"I can't believe you have half our friends conned into thinking you don't have a sense of humour," Hawke says. "It's as bad as mine."

We deserve each other.

The words are in Fenris' mouth, sit heavy on his tongue. He cannot—he keeps the scrap of red cloth wound tight around his wrist although it frays and fades and still he cannot.

How many times must he ruin perfectly good levity?

"I don't know about that," he says, but he knows his tone is not quite right, sees it in the way Hawke's gaze turns a little tired. He shrugs. "I thought you might appreciate a drink."

"Maker, you can say _that_ again," Hawke says. 

One week ago, Fenris watched him fall and feared he would not rise. That he would summon the last of his magic and use it not to save himself but—

"Hawke," Fenris says. "Allow people to worry."

"Ah, yes, the voice of authority," Hawke says; not with malice, but the blow hits home all the same.

"It is no easy thing to manage," Fenris says. "That's why I say it. _Hawke_ —"

"Don't," Hawke says. "Look, don't you want to see Bear do a trick or something? Let's talk about absolutely anything you like so long as it isn't about my feelings or my health."

"I thought you were going to die," Fenris says.

"Oh, for fuck's sake," Hawke says, but his shoulders have slumped. "Yes. Me too. Also Bodahn, who apparently doesn't know when to stop with the nursing business. But hey, look, all the bits where they're meant to be. Handy having a knack for healing, isn't it?"

"But no bedside manner at all," Fenris says.

"Well, no," Hawke says. "Can't have there being an actual demand for my services."

"Hm," Fenris says, playing up his doubt more than is strictly necessary.

Hawke laughs at this modest theatrical performance. "Look, I'm fine. You came with wine. Let's drink."

"Yes," Fenris says, and hands him the bottle, and sinks into a crouch to indulge Bear in scratching his stomach, coarse coat and soft undercoat.

Bear makes a sound like _wurrah_ and wriggles hopefully for a repeat, gazing demonstratively at Hawke the entire time.

"I know," Fenris says. "He's hopeless."

When he looks up, the expression on Hawke's face ought to be sincerely comical, the combination put-upon and endeared and that other unspeakable thing. 

Instead it catches somewhere behind Fenris' ribs, a hook tugging him to Hawke.

Wine.

They drink.

Fenris, cross-legged on the floor with Bear's head upside down on his lap, realises:

Although he should leave, leave this city and these friends, Varric and Aveline and Hawke, perhaps Isabela, if she returns—leave them before Danarius reaches out his long hand and ruins one more thing, ruins them, merely for this peace which Fenris has won with them—

He will never be able to.

He will not run.

Weakness and strength, indistinguishable.

Here, he has laughed and learned and fallen in love. He has gathered to himself a meagre collection of possessions that is all the same more than he could have dreamed. 

He has begun to hope, in his way, for something—for a change, a progression, the pieces of a puzzle finally falling into place.

The words of a dry Chantry sister's dissertation on Shartan and his possible existence or nonexistence, dissonant verses read at last, the words of Shartan himself in a forbidden book.

A piece of red cloth. Hawke's throat works when he swallows, and Fenris pressed his face there once. Hawke laughs at his own jokes and throws an arm around Fenris' neck in the same way he did with Isabela, does with Varric, although his eyes when he looks at Fenris still carry a little sadness. Although he grows quiet, at times, and Fenris feels the space where Carver should sit; feels the space where a joke about his mother's oddities should be.

In Fenris' crumbling stolen mansion, pieces of a life collect. Paper and memory and trinkets. A fine sword was a gift, an amulet bought. 

Water shivers gold at the docks at sunset, and Fenris knows the songs the labourers sing there.

The floors of the Hanged Man are polished smooth beneath his feet. Varric, buying him a drink and insulting him at once.

Bear snores on his lap. Between Fenris and Hawke, the bottle is empty. 

Hawke looks at Fenris with dark eyes, his skin smooth deep bronze in the lamplight, of a tone with Fenris' but treated more kindly by life. Bare arms, unmarred. Freckled, only. Perks of having a knack for healing. And luck.

Hawke's paternal grandmother, Fenris knows now, was Rivaini. And here is Hawke: pieces of him from everywhere and nowhere, migrant and missfit and lord.

He says, "Tell me a story, Fenris. Anything."

"Should I tuck you up in bed while I'm at it?" Fenris asks.

"Not a bad idea," Hawke says. "Save Bodahn the trouble."

"Hopeless," Fenris says. "I fear few of my stories are good ones."

Hawke smiles at him. "They're yours. That's enough."

 

 

Days of fighting and evenings of drinking, of learning the rules of new games. Stories in Hawke's library and the shapes of sound after sound. 

And nights when they are not fighting, alone. Always, nights alone: Fenris and his ghosts. He wakes in a start to a shout on the street and, in panic, thinks that it is someone coming for him. Where is he, who is he? A thing with no name, gasping in the dark, remembering violation, the deliberate, viscious denial of boundaries. To be only a thing.

Hadriana smirked as she tilted his chin up, the moon slanting across the room to throw light on his face, shadow on hers.

Danarius' hand on his stomach, mouth turned to his ear, words whispered beneath sunlit leaves. Fenris trembled, but was still, because he was as he had been made.

But life returns by degrees. Hadriana is dead.

Danarius will die. Believe it, hold it. Curl your hands around this warm little idea as though cradling a baby bird, too young to fly.

And still: these are the stories he doesn't tell. How would he tell them? If he spoke these words to Hawke, would he perhaps draw the correct conclusion?

It would do nothing but hurt them both.

He grits his teeth until they ache. Sits by the open window and looks out over the city, falling away circle by circle to the water. Lanterns on the streets form patterns in the dark. The city is a maze, a scrawled sigil, spells words in a language he does not quite read.

The Gallows is a dark shape against the sky. The high cliffs block the stars.

There is no moon to stripe his face with light, not even pale Satina.

They must not fall, these tenuously balanced Circle towers. He knows too well where that would lead. And yet, if he imagines Hawke within their confines—

We make ourselves as complex; we make ourselves as multiple, contradictory creatures.

He sits until his limbs grow cold and stiff with stillness, until he has felt all he can possibly feel, is left empty and exhausted. Sleeps as the sun rises, and wakes to Hawke or Aveline or Varric or the bureaucratic servants of a Viscount who no longer exists hammering at the door.

 

 

There are other nights, of course. It has been a year and still he remembers Hawke's touch as he did when he ran from the house, the night that it happened. Hawke's mouth on his, desperate, clumsy. The press of their bodies, fully clothed. The promise of it. 

Fenris wakes with every knowledge of who he is, and where, and, knowing, aches.

A hand between his legs, quick and furtive, as though he might be discovered.

He buries his face in the pillow when he comes, cry muffled.

On these nights, too, he sits awake for long hours. Imagines—what he might have, if he only knew how to allow it without losing himself. He exists, but tenuously. He is here, he is Fenris. But all of it is new and fragile.

He reads books by lamplight, still, always; so many secrets unlocked in their angular lines. So many thoughts and ideas that can come from within a person's mind. He knew it, of course; knew stories, songs, things of infinite repetition and variation, whose author is everyone and no-one. 

But here a single person speaks. 

Voices across the years. Lives. Shartan was only the beginning of it.

 

 

"I have a lead for you," Aveline says. "It's not definite, but we could try to send a letter."

Winter is long gone. Small flowers open, clinging to the dirt between the cracked stones of the city, turning to the warm summer sun. The gardens of Hightown are green and bright. Behind his mansion, sharp-thorned vines curl around untended trellises, and the grass rises to the waist. But these things too flower in their way, grow vibrant.

Fenris paces.

It is a trap. Of course it is a trap; of course Hadriana would never have truly helped him, not even when she thought her life depended on it. There is no sister, or there is Danarius between them, watching for his letter, waiting to bait him out away from his companions, take him.

An obvious bait, the entire thing.

And yet he knows he will take it. Grasping after fragments, some thread of the person he was to bind his struggling new self together.

"You don't have to do this, Fenris," Aveline says. 

"No," Fenris says. "No, I do. I must. I will have a letter for you tomorrow."

"Alright," she says. "It's good to try. Don't expect too much. We don't know her situation."

"I expect nothing," Fenris says, harsh. "I—my apologies. This is not easy for me."

Aveline is silent. Sitting, she watches him. Her fingers tap on the table.

"I expect nothing," Fenris says again. "But I must make the attempt."

"Yes," she says. "Tomorrow, then."

And so she leaves him, and he writes. His hand is awkward, his words stilted. Attempt after attempt is rejected, until he could snarl in frustration. Hawke would help him, but he cannot ask it; cannot form himself around Hawke. This he must do himself, for his own sake.

He sends the letter.

 

 

It is winter again before an answer comes, the road long and the topic sensitive. It is an indefinite answer, but not a flatly discouraging one. 

So he writes again, and waits. 

 

 

And that spring, Isabela returns. A new hat with a curling plume, the same swing in her step as ever. A new scar from a knife wound on her shoulder. She freckles like Hawke in the sun, although she's darker; she's older, too, and the constellations on her skin stay the winter.

"I went north," she says. "I've a friend or two left in Antiva. I thought they could use a surprise."

"And could they?"

"Oh, _yes,_ " Isabela says. "It was very surprising."

She smiles, broad, self-satisfied.

"But not Castillon?"

"Oh, hush," Isabela says. "Of course it wasn't, but you don't need to ruin my mood right away. Here I thought I missed you."

"You did miss me," Fenris says.

Isabela laughs. "Maybe. You're very decorative."

"Talk to Hawke," Fenris says. "He did miss you, you know." An unspoken thing. Hawke appears carefree, voices few of his fears in private and none in mixed company. All the same, things wear on him.

"Perhaps," Isabela says, and there's avoidance in there. "The world's bigger than Hawke, you know."

Fenris levels an unimpressed stare at her. "Are we talking about you or me now?"

The mirroring works, those parting words returned, disarmed. It amazes Fenris that he can do it. That it barely stings.

Isabela relaxes.

"I wonder," she says. Smirking.

"I'm not interested," Fenris clarifies.

"Oh, I know _that_ ," she says. "You and Hawke. Idiots. Think of all the fun you could be having."

"I'm having fun," Fenris says, tone flat, and Isabela has been away for long enough that it takes her a moment to catch the nuance and burst out laughing again.

There.

"How's the city?" she asks, when she's sobered.

"How is it ever," Fenris says. "The Hanged Man is still there. The rest is politics."

"Oh, politics," she says. "Let's not."

"There are more slavers here recently," he says. "Down by the docks. In darktown, sometimes. I've a mind to do some cleaning, if you'd join me."

"Ooh, you do know how to show a girl a good time after all," Isabela says. "Just tell me who to stab."

 

 

It is this that Hawke sees, then, standing in the doorway of the Hanged Man: Fenris and Varric and Isabela, Aveline just returning with a drink. Merrill, brighter than she has been in a year. Even Anders, pale and worn. He is there little these days, and Fenris is not sorry for it. He appears only if Varric drags him in, or Hawke. Scribbles words on scraps of paper, drinks nothing. 

His presence is an itching reminder of everything that Fenris is hunted by, more so even than Merrill, whose foolishness is at least turned inward. But here they all are, sitting together. It is a ceasefire, for Isabela. 

It is a ceasefire, for Hawke.

Fenris, turning a fraction quicker than the others, so attuned to Hawke's presence, is rewarded by the sight of the quick grin that the group of them earn, Hawke's whole face lighting up, and oh, what wouldn't Fenris do to make him smile like that more often. It is worth it, worth it, even as Anders says something snide and Varric tries to be disarming.

To sit down to drink with three mages. One distrusted, one pitied, one beloved. And it feels worth it.

Strange times indeed.

This, Fenris thinks, this place, these people, are together the living heart of the city. All its flaws and tensions. He does not know his place in it. 

But it seems that he has one.

Hawke claps him on the shoulder, drops into the space between Fenris himself and Isabela. Their legs are pressed together to the knee, Hawke's shoulder is pressed to the back of Fenris'. His hand lies on the back of the bench, and if Fenris leans back, it will touch him.

There are limits to strength.

He leans back. Makes no eye contact with Hawke, says nothing. Only lets the life of the place flow around him, and lets the warmth of Hawke's hand settle into his back.

Hawke's fingers shift minutely against him. It might only be the usual restlessness of Hawke's demeanor. It might be.

It pleases and scares Fenris to think that perhaps it is not. To think that if he was ready, one day—

To finish the thought feels as though it would be to curse it.

Merrill is telling a story that has Isabela in stitches, "and then _she_ said to the tree, oh, don't worry about it, it happens to us all sometimes—"

"Maker preserve us," Varric says.

"May the Dread Wolf take you," Isabela is sniggering to herself, as if a repetition of some earlier punchline that has escaped him entirely. "Kitten! You're making this up. I'm not sure it's even legal for Aveline to hear this story. What if she has to arrest us all for public indecency. What if she has to _spank_ us."

"I don't need to hear your perverted fantasies," Aveline says fondly.

Isabela mimes kissing in her general direction.

"This is your fault," Fenris says quietly to Hawke. "Every single bit of this conversation, which I am cursed to endure, is your fault."

"Aren't you glad?" Hawke says. He sounds like he's grinning, though Fenris is still refusing to make eye contact, as though that might somehow lead Hawke to remove his hand.

"Yes," Fenris says, even lower, unable to hide his sincerity. "Very."

And so it goes.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

But here, finally, is the point where it changes for Fenris:

A letter, held in a trembling hand, signed and dated Kirkwall, 10 Ferventis. He has read it twice, had Aveline read it aloud to him to be certain of every nuance. Dear Brother, I hope you will meet me—

"Are you _certain?_ " Fenris asks. "I need you to be certain!"

"There is no certainty, Fenris," Aveline says. "Not in this. You can't ask that. I've kept a close eye on the docks, I'll always see to it that you're as safe as you can be. I don't see any signs of a trap."

"That simply means that the trap may be very good," Fenris says, snarls, frustration uncontainable, fear, hope—

"That's the risk you have to take," Aveline says. "Tell Hawke, Fenris. He'll help."

"That's _exactly_ what I'm afraid of," Fenris snaps, and knows the untruth of it as he says it. 

Knows that he wants Hawke there. At his back, always; but at his side, also, if there is by some miracle no trap waiting to be sprung. At his side to help him understand whatever fragments of his past remain to him.

In hindsight, he will think of this as the moment when he decided, in the midst of that argument, chasing in circles around the impossibility of knowing.

Now, he only has the strength with which he longs for Hawke's support; the gratitude with which he takes it when it is offered. 

 

 

And then his hands are bloodied again, and he does not regret it.

Or:

And then he is free.

Or:

And then he is untethered.

There is nothing for him to root himself in.

"Fenris," Hawke says, "you don't want to kill her. She's still your sister. However little you mean to each other, just—don't do this, not in anger."

He does want to do it. He does. He wants it with blinding force.

He wants it with all of the anger that they instilled in him, those people who truly did deserve to die. And how sick did he feel, how much did he regret it, when he found himself too weak to keep his word to Hadriana in the cavern?

He subsides. Bows his head.

"I'm sorry," Hawke says.

But Hawke was right. Intellectually, he knows it. He hopes that he will know it in his heart, away from the moment, the bodies, the rising smell of blood in the hot room. Away from Varania's words, shaking him to his core, he wanted it, wanted it, it was his _fault_. 

The gaping hole in Danarius' chest. 

To think that the man had a heart to crush after all.

To think that there is no part of Fenris that magic has not sullied.

But this at least he has won:

He does not run from Hawke. He says, only, "I need to leave."

Lets Hawke lead the way out of the mess they have made of the place in Kirkwall he always thought of as most like a home.

 

 

"It wasn't," Hawke says. "It wasn't your fault. Sounds to me like you did what you could with a shit deal."

"And what would you know?" Fenris asks, but he is too tired to really fight, too worn down.

There is a quiet corner of Hightown near the market stairs, a forgotten little corner screened from view. There they sit, leaning against the sun-warm wall behind them, their feet towards the long drop to the lower city. The sky burns bright with the sunset. His bloodied gauntlets lie beside him. The red fabric he has pulled loose, winds absently around his bare wrist.

Hawke watches the process, and says nothing.

"Oh, you know, not that much," Hawke says. "Just that the people being fucked over usually weren't actually _asking_ for it. Maybe that's just silly old me not knowing anything, though."

"I find you insufferable," Fenris says. Leans a little closer, as though a coincidence, a consequence of shifting himself into a more comfortable position against the stone. 

"You do _not_ ," Hawke says.

"No," Fenris agrees. "Hawke. I—this has all been so much. I owe you my thanks, once again. How many times have you won me my life? And I have little to give you in return."

"Friendship," Hawke says. "We've had this talk."

But he says it gently.

"Is that what it is?" Fenris asks. Sighs. "No, don't answer. I am only tired."

"Go home," Hawke says. "Clean up. I'll come for you whenever you want."

I am yours, Fenris thinks. You don't need to wait for me to summon you.

He says, "Come tonight, then. Give me an hour or two, only."

Hawke lays a huge, gentle hand on his knee, and says, "Of course."

For a moment, on a ledge overlooking the city and harbour, Fenris thinks that he will be kissed.

But Hawke holds on tight to his self-control, as he ever has. Obfuscates it, makes light of it, but holds it.

Fenris rises, and manages an awkward smile, and walks back across Hightown alone.

 

 

How his thoughts tangle. Alone, he clears the debris of the day from the room he has made something of a home. Alone, he fetches wood for the fire and water for bathing.

It is clarity he seeks in these acts, an illumination of the difference between yesterday and today. I was hunted, I am free.

It feels the same. And then, because it feels the same, it feels worse.

He scrubs at his face with shaking hands, fumbles with the fastenings of his armour. 

Killing Danarius was a victory, and it feels only like a void at his feet.

You can do anything you want. Oh, yes—anything at all. Varric has asked after his plans already, and Aveline too. Now Fenris is done with his search for vengeance, it's all in order. Isn't that nice.

Isabela offered him a non-existent job on a non-existent ship, which was at least a more novel and specific sort of irritation. Not a thing to be had that doesn't scrape terribly up against his battered, overworked consciousness. Nothing except Hawke on a ledge in the sunset, pushing back against a reflexive assignment of blame which Fenris had not even voiced aloud.

" _Venhedis,_ " he mutters, to the empty room.

The door. Footsteps.

"I can come back," Hawke says.

"Stay," Fenris says, and in his voice he is revealed. Such a longing. His conscious mind had hardly recognised it. But there it is, for Hawke to make of what he will.

 

 

And what does he say, in the hour that follows? Everything he can. Freedom, magic, and choice. The hollow emptiness of the day. He has rarely spoken so much. Even in confidence, in stories, Hawke has pressed details from him, deft and curious.

But now he simply speaks.

Hawke takes it all in, poor humour, a kind smile.

He says: "Are you going to leave?"

"No," Fenris says. "I think—no."

He could not. It would be cowardice, pure and undisguisable.

"I was hoping," Hawke says, falters. "I wondered if you'd stay by my side, whatever's coming."

And there is nothing Fenris could desire more.

His heart is in his throat. He feels his pulse heavy in his ears, in his wrists. Wonders if he remembers, in it all, to breathe.

Here they are, here at the heart of the thing, all the unspoken longing and confusion and hurt, these three long years.

We've never—I could not—I remember your touch as if—

Fenris says, "Nothing could be worse than the thought of living without you."

He has held the truth of it tight, clung to it. He has made it a part of himself, and willingly. Yes, he is Hawke's. And Hawke, perhaps, is his.

It is not annihilation. It is to stand side by side and look towards some unknown future. 

_And before them, empty_  
_Outstretched lay the land—_

Yes, he would die for Hawke. Freely, without shame or compulsion.

" _Fenris,_ " Hawke says. "Fenris—"

And Fenris' hands on his face are ungentle, and his mouth is desperate, and the noise that Hawke makes into this frantic kiss is something that Fenris will not forget for as long as he lives.

"Are you crying," he murmurs, when they part. "Hawke, really."

"Ancient dust in my eye," Hawke says. "I'm going to make you clean, so help me."

His thumb rubs circles on Fenris' cheek, and Fenris leans into it, turns his face to kiss the palm of Hawke's hand as he did once years before.

Hawke's expression is stunned, and oh, if Fenris has retraced those moments they shared a thousand times in his mind, at least he is not alone in it.

"Fenris," Hawke says for a third time, and he says it like a prayer.

And what is Fenris to do with that? What has Fenris ever been able to do with that?

Only try to be brave in the face of overwhelming belief.

Only kiss Hawke again.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] Between the Elevated Road and the Water](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8776165) by [RsCreighton](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RsCreighton/pseuds/RsCreighton)




End file.
